Designing quantitative research

A GENTLE INTRODUCTION TO EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS

3 November 2014

When suitably conducted, experiments in education provide strong tests of causal hypotheses, for example, “cooperative learning enhances learning”. In this presentation I will review the fundamentals of experimental methods for testing hypotheses about teaching and learning. Beginning with the process of hypothesis generation and moving through into hypothesis testing, examples of experimental designs from my own research program will be discussed, including the importance of testing of analytic assumptions. The scope will be largely introductory, but will include considerations of more complex designs and their analysis.

Speaker:Dr Paul Ginns is a senior lecturer in educational psychology with the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, and a research progress manager with the school's Office of Doctoral Studies. He is an active educational researcher, and has worked independently and in collaboration with both Australian and international colleagues on a wide variety of educational research projects.

Currently, his research is focused on applying the principles of cognitive science to instructional design, as well as on ways to use institutionally-aligned, student-focused teaching-evaluation systems to improve the university-student experience.